Take, for example, Chinese astronaut Chen Dong. With members of the Chinese national table tennis team watching him on the Tiangong 2 space station by video link, he played ping-pong against himself.

The trick is that, free from earth’s gravity, the ball can be induced to move slowly enough that Chen was able to scoot/scamper/float from side to side and hit it back to himself.

In a link from China first run down by Mashable, the pro table tennis players found the whole thing highly amusing. Liu Guoliang, the national team’s head coach was in the studio with gold medalist Ma Long and silver medalist Zhang Ji Ke and said of Chen “he moves even faster than Ma or Zhang.”

Chen has been in space with fellow astronaut Jing Haipeng, who has a cameo in the video, since October. You need a little something to deal with the monotony, but we’d like to know who was smart enough to remember to pack the ping-pong paddles and balls.

John Hickey is a sports reporter for the Bay Area News Group who returned to the organization in 2013 to cover the A's, a team he'd covered previously from 1986-1999. In between he covered the Mariners in Seattle for 13 seasons.

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